Cypress, TX
2.??.2022
In August of 2014 at the University of North Carolina, Crystal began her graduate studies in Biostatistics and met Daniel, who had entered the same program the year before she did. They took little to no notice of one another despite being in the same research group and having neighboring desks. One year later, being the former high school choir nerd that she is, Crystal enrolled in voice lessons and was in need of an accompanist. Lucky for her, labmate Daniel was quite the talented pianist. It wasn’t long before Crystal and Daniel were regularly headed out to practice rooms for jam sessions with music genres ranging from opera and musical theatre to pop.
An entire year later, Crystal and Daniel discovered another shared passion: street tacos. By now, Crystal realized she had a pretty big crush on Daniel. One evening, Daniel and Crystal found themselves headed out for some spontaneous late night tacos. Now on the one hand, this was excellent news for Crystal. Was Daniel interested? Maybe! On the other hand, Crystal had just eaten a massive burrito for dinner and had little to no interest in eating for at least another 4.5 days. But she couldn’t back out now! After (begrudgingly) eating just one taco, they spent four hours in the university quad playing duets on Daniel’s guitar. When they finally went home, Crystal was on cloud 9, and Daniel thought to himself “Wow, I guess that wasn’t so bad.” Soon after, “not so bad” turned into something more, and their relationship officially launched on 09/20/2016 with music, tacos, and swing dancing.
Daniel and Crystal’s ensuing relationship achieved 1 ER visit, 2 perforated eardrums, 3 more years of grad school misery/accomplishments, and countless late nights of playing music in the park. After they completed their doctorate degrees, Daniel and Crystal made a big move up north to Boston, MA for their first big kid jobs. When their 3rd anniversary came around, they made plans to visit Cape Cod (or “the Cod,” as Crystal accidentally calls it).
They headed out to the beach just before sunset with guitar in hand. After a few duets, Daniel serenaded Crystal with an original song. As if that wasn’t romantic enough, he then pulled out their “Adventure Book,” a scrapbook of their relationship. He had added several pages for a number of events that had occurred since the scrapbook’s last update. The last page had only a caption with no photo: “9/21/2019: The day you said ‘yes!’”
Casey
Michael
Anna
Nuvan
Jonathan
Jonathan
Joshua
Barbara
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Graham
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Friday, February ?, 2022
Northwest Houston Vietnamese Alliance Church
5133 Addicks Satsuma Rd, Cypress, TX 77084
Ceremony (Time TBA)
Dinner to Follow
Saturday, February ?, 2022
We are looking for a new venue! Date and Location are TBD, but we are looking for a Saturday in Feburary 2022 in the Cypress, TX area.
Ceremony (Time TBA)
Dinner and Drinks to Follow
Element Houston Vintage Park
We believe we are still booking with Element Houston Vintage Park, but the wedding block deal is TBD until we figure out the when and where we are getting married.
George Bush Intercontinental Airport
35 minutes to Cypress
Recommended for most airlines
William P. Hobby Airport
45 minutes to Cypress
Recommended for Southwest airlines
More information coming soon!
We are registered at Amazon.com and Crate & Barrel.
We ask that there be no boxed gifts brought to the wedding. It sure would be difficult to bring gifts home with us to Boston! Both registries will allow you to ship directly to us. A box will be available at the reception for any cards.
We have currently turned off our RSVP portal, as we are now postponing our wedding with a new date/location TBD. Please check back later. If you have already RSVP’d for our original date, you will be able to re-fill the RSVP again later or we will follow up with you to double check.
Postponement Alert:
As of 10/6/2020, we have made the unfortunate and difficult decision to postpone our wedding. With no vaccine available, cases on the rise again, and flu season here, we cannot see a feasible way to keep ourselves, our loved ones (that’s you!), and our vendors safe. Moving forward with our original date would have required a lot of cross-state travel, as Crystal’s parents are the only two people out of all the immediate family and bridal party who are local to Cypress, TX!
We apologize for any inconvenience this postponement may bring you. No one is more sorry than we are that we won’t get to host our wedding on our originally intended date! That said, between this postponement and all the social distancing, we are all the more excited to celebrate with you when the time comes.
We promise we are working as quickly as we can to book a new date at a new venue and get change-the-dates out to everyone. All we can say for now is that we are looking for a Saturday in February of 2022. Below are answers to some common follow up questions to our postponement.
i. What’s so special about February?
1. Can you tell me more about the Vietnamese tea ceremony?
The tea ceremony is the traditional wedding ritual performed in Vietnamese culture. The bride and groom pour tea for their parents and grandparents while receiving blessings or marital advice in return. Please note that it may be difficult to hear some of the more intimate parts of the ceremony which are performed without a microphone.
The main difference for guests is the procession. The family of the bride gathers inside the sanctuary upon arrival. Barring any inclement weather, family of the groom and any friends are asked to assemble outside and follow the procession inside when the ceremony begins.
We know that attending a Friday event may be difficult for many, but we hope you’ll join us if you are able to make it!
2. What is the recommended attire?
For the wedding on Saturday, we recommend semi-formal: your favorite suit, dress, or pantsuit.
For the tea ceremony on Friday, we recommend “dressy casual” (see here). We also welcome ao dai, a traditional Vietnamese style of clothing, or any traditional attire from your culture.
However, we hope that you will feel free to come as you are, whether that’s in a t-shirt and jeans or your prom dress!
3. Is any part of the celebration outdoors?
4. Where can I find parking?
5. Will transportation be provided?
6. How should I submit my RSVP?
7. Who is Bishop?
8. Will Bishop be at the wedding?
9. Why is your website a little clunky?
It’s been a minute since I last posted! That’s mostly because things have slowed down, as you may have noticed, due to this little COVID-19 bug that’s been going around. I hope you’re all staying safe and sound. Daniel and I have had a few conversations on what we think the plan is come time for our wedding, but the truth is we just can’t make any decisions until closer to then. Things are changing so fast that it’s hard for us to predict what the world is going to look like in even just a few months. Even if Texas relaxes restrictions on gathering sizes, it still might not be safe enough to have all our loved ones put themselves at risk for travel. We will definitely keep you all updated as we make our decisions, though!
On a lighter note, we sent out our save the dates this afternoon! I really enjoyed this project, especially since we got to really make it our own, and it saved us a pretty penny, too! There are actually two parts to this one: designing the save the dates and making the envelopes. That’s right, we made the envelopes. Seems silly, I know, but I wasn’t really into spending $30 on envelopes after we’d saved at least that much by printing our own save the dates.
So first, designing these things. It’s actually not that hard! Some free software, a good quality photo, and a glass of wine (optional) are all you need. I used Inkscape, a free and open source vector graphics editor. It will do similar things to Adobe Photoshop or InDesign, and, for the budget-bride, it’s just the right price. The user interface for this software is…not ideal, but again it is free.
First, you’ll want to go to File > Document Properties and set the size of your save the date. We were going to print using the postcard size at Staples, so I went ahead and used those dimensions. Next, import your image (File > Import), and crop it to your desired size by clipping it. We used the original file from our engagement photographer to keep the super high resolution.
Easily add words using the text box feature. Luckily, unlike the Cricut Design Space software, you do not have to manually place letters. Similar to Microsoft Word, you can set the character and line spacing to your preferences.
Honestly, the back was more difficult because of the flowers. I found an image using these flowers as a free scalable vector graphic (svg) file just by a simple google search. You want to find a .svg as opposed to another image filetype to better maintain the quality of the image when you go to print. That way, you’ll limit the risk of getting something that looks really rough and pixelated. Again, I fiddled around with it, cropping, duplicating, rotating, and more to rearrange the original flower file into the repeated pattern with the middle section cut out. It took longer than I’d like to admit, but the back of the card needed color.
They came together really well, and with a coupon from Staples, we only spent $60 to print 250 of them at the postcard size. We did not need 250, but this was the smallest amount we could buy to get the number we actually needed (125). Compare this to using a premade template and just filling in our information for $175 at Vistaprint at the time we got them printed (December 2019) for 150. And we wouldn’t get to use our own fonts, either!
Okay, now for the envelopes, because you know every extra penny is getting pinched to put toward that sweet, sweet open bar.
Cricut supplies:
Other:
I found a free template for envelopes posted by some very kind soul (see here). Most people would post it for sale on Etsy or Cricut, but lucky for me I found these. The trick to get custom sized envelopes is to calculate the scale factor to get the perforation area to fit your card size. The box marking the perforation area is where your card will actually fit into, so you’ll also want to leave a bit of extra room. That extra space will leave wiggle room for the card to slide in and for the paper to fold on itself. For example, if the width of the perforate rectangle in the template is 8" and your card is 4" wide, you’ll want to resize that box to be 4 1/8" wide. So \(4.125 / 8 = 0.52\). Then multiply the width of the entire cut + score object by \(0.52\) and resize to that value. Do the same with the length.
Next is addressing the envelopes. Recall from my last post that this is tedious to set up in Cricut Design Space: you have to manually place all of the cursive letters in the Cricut Design Space software to make it look like one fluid written stroke. Another difficulty I encountered was the overall placement of the design onto the envelope. Cricut leaves a 1/4" left margin on all projects to make sure it doesn’t go off the page. This is not so ideal for this envelope template that barely fits on 8.5 x 11" cardstock. I had to offset the cardstock on the mat by 1/4" to make sure it fit. I had to toss a few in the recycling because it was too far in either direction.
As much as I love the drawing feature of the Cricut Explore Air 2, I wasn’t about spending $4 per pen for the Cricut brand pen. Cricut smartly creates their own pens, and you basically have to be lucky to find a pen of the same thickness to fit into the machine if you want to go off brand. However, I found a pen Daniel’s parents had given us for Christmas a couple years ago. It’s got a great felt tip for a craft like this, and it was free (to us). Unfortunately, it was too skinny to fit into my Cricut. Since I didn’t want to be reliant on whatever pens Cricut decides to produce, I purchased a set of adapters that would allow me to use whatever pen/marker of my choosing in the Cricut! One of these fit the new pen perfectly, so when my Cricut pen from the original bundle ran out of ink, I easily switched to this one. Actually, I liked it better as it was a bit thinner and gave more of an actually handwritten look.
Finally, all that was left was to assemble! Fold along the perforated lines, and tape the flaps down. I had the best results when applying the tape to the flaps on the top and bottom rather than the left and right sides. My mom had gotten me the Scotch ATG 700 double-sided tape gun for Christmas this last year. Naturally, I was elated. This is one of my favorite new crafting tools. We’ve taped up all the save the dates, and we haven’t even gone through half of the first wheel of tape. The tape holds SO WELL; it is better than any other adhesive I’ve ever used. It goes on clean and smooth. The two caveats are price and it being a bit difficult to replace the tape wheel inside the dispenser.
I think that about sums it up. Happy crafting, and stay safe out there!
11/23/2019
You may have noticed we don’t have an equal number of groomsmen and bridesmaids on our main page of this website. We’ve opted to just call our wedding party an “I Do Crew.” This decision was made for a few different reasons, but, primarily, we didn’t want to have to fight over who got to stand on whose side just because of gender. Each member of this incredible crew is friend or (future) family to us both. At the end of the day, we know they are not rooting for just one of us, but for the both of us in our marriage.
Okay, I’m done being sappy - onto the crafts. I took this project on to (1) be cutesy and (2) to test a couple of crafting techniques that I was hoping to use on later paper crafts for our wedding.
What the heck is a proposal card? Just a little greeting card, sent in the mail or in person, to “propose” that a person be in your wedding party. Basically, one of those Hallmark industry made up things, but it’s pretty hard for me to turn down a DIY opportunity. We went through a few drafts to get the process down as well as the aesthetic/vibe we were going for. We ultimately decided to personalize each card with a handwritten message. Because we were leaving the inside blank, the project became a lot easier from a crafting perspective.
Single use supplies:
Cricut supplies:
We chose to use some free fonts we found on dafont.com: Made The Artist Script and Neris Thin. These fonts are used throughout our website and will be used on forthcoming wedding stationary. Once downloaded and installed, these fonts are available in the Cricut Design Space software that is associated with Cricut machines, as well as all your other text editor software.
Designing the card itself is fairly simple. A rectangular shape creates the cut outline, the line across the middle is set to “score,” and the text, “Will you be in our” is set to draw. I typically find that the custom material setting on the Cricut works better than any of the presets. In the software, I then select the appropriate material (medium cardstock here), and the software then guides you through which tool is needed when (fine point pen, scoring stylus, or fine point blade) for you to switch out and continue. I found the light grip mat to work better than a standard grip; the standard was too sticky and would leave most of my cardstock still stuck to the mat after trying to remove it.
Working with the adhesive foil was only about 50 times harder. First off, when cutting a material into cursive text, you must manually place the letters to get the letters to connect as though written with a single pen stroke. The “weld” option in Cricut Design then tells the machine to treat all the words as a single object rather than independent letters (so you get “hello world” as opposed to “h e l l o w o r l d”).
Here I again used custom material and selected adhesive foil. Definitely use a light grip mat, as the foil is a much daintier medium. Unfortunately, the Cricut brand metallic foils are not very sticky, making them very difficult to transfer. The foil comes with a paper backing, similar to stickers that are sold on wax paper. The Cricut adhesive foil setting knows to cut very lightly, only cutting the foil and not all the way through the backing as well. You then have to “weed” the cut foil, i.e., remove all the background parts surrounding the letters (the holes in the letters “e” and “o”) without removing tiny pieces (punctuation, the dot on the letter “i”). I won’t lie, this part was the worst.
BUT it was definitely worth it. Finally, you have to carefully use transfer tape to relocate the letters from the wax paper to the cardstock. Again, the foil is not that sticky, causing the letters to move around on accident and no longer having that cursive writing effect.
I’m pretty happy with how they came out, even if they’re not all that uniform. Things I learned for when we do a similar process for the invitations: slow and steady keeps all your foil letters intact, print out excess periods for when you lose the dots for the letter “i,” and always always make extras!
10/15/2019
Hello, friends and family!
I am dedicating this blog to all things DIY that Daniel and I work on throughout the wedding planning process. This will include, but may not be limited to, I Do Crew proposals, invitations, gifts, and even the very website you are reading from now. I don’t expect all or even any of you to find this remotely interesting, but maybe you will! At the very least, I wanted to document the neat things we come up with and describe how to do them in case other crafty couples wanted to learn from our successes and our mistakes.
If you didn’t already know, I really love crafting. The process of taking raw materials and creating something appreciable brings me great joy whether it’s baking, wood crafting, or scrapbooking. Until recently, I have always been a busy student without a lot of time available for crafting. However, I now work that wonderful 9-5 and, better yet, have an occassion to take on some really great crafting projects: our engagement!
When we first sat down to discuss the vision of our wedding and what experience we wanted to walk away with, we agreed that we wanted our personality as a couple to really shine through the decisions. Rather than purchasing all of our wedding “stuff,” we figured we could save a few bucks by doing some of it ourselves. Moreover, we could better tailor our products when building our wedding brand to be the same across everything we distribute, starting with our wedding website.
We are, like many other engaged couples, using sites like WeddingWire and theknot in the planning process, but we just weren’t satisfied with the options for creating a wedding website. We couldn’t get the exact colors we wanted on all the website elements, there weren’t a lot of options for fonts, and, most of all, the data format of the guest list and RSVP form were not conducive to analysis. This last point probably sounds really silly, but it was a deal breaker for us.
As a data scientist and research analyst by trade, Daniel and I could not stand the thought of willingly creating a guest list that was not easy to manipulate in data analytic software. With my background in creating flexdashboards in R and Daniel’s experience with collaborative version control in GitHub, we knew there had to be a way to get this done. Now, this is most certainly not the most intuitive way to create a website. It definitely isn’t the easiest (trust me, we did a pretty thorough search for web hosting options through R). Most web developers would use HTML programming, not statistical programming, but it’s what we know!
So, without further ado, how the heck does one create a website using a language not conventional for building a website (rivetting, I know)? First off, I would describe R as a great tool for anyone looking to be a data scientist or analyst. The software is free to download and completely open source, making it an ideal sandbox for data junkies like Daniel and me. More recently, R’s capabilities in making dashboards for data visualization has become quite popular (see here for examples). Some of these kinds of dashboards (flexdashboards) can produce html output, a file format you can easily save and send to others, and it will open and function conveniently for them.
But we want a website: a URL that guests can search for in their browser, not a file we have to email to all of our guests individually! GitHub Pages to the rescue. GitHub is a place where you can practice version control – it’s like the track changes feature on a Google document but for any file that you may be making frequent edits to. GitHub Pages lets you upload the html file you may have, and it will host that file as a functioning website with a domain name of your choosing. Other sites and apps like Google Drive actually let you do this as well, but GitHub is a great, free option when multiple people are working together on the same project.
So we got to work. Daniel picked up some flexdashboard experience, and I got the hang of GitHub. We both had to learn a small amount of HTML programming, but we got this project up and running within a matter of hours. That’s pretty quick as far as collaborative deliverables go!
You may have noticed that our website is password protected. It was important to us to maintain some level of privacy. The free version of GitHub is intended for open access, encouraging collaboration and easy distribution of content and ideas. You can follow these instructions to implement password protection on any website. It was super easy. You basically just have to know how to create and rename a folder, and you’re set.
We still have a ways to go. Not all of our tabs are set up. We’ll need to link our RSVP page to a Google form to collect RSVPs. Who knows if the site will be horribly slow once we add photos to the gallery. Maybe I’ll post an update later as to how it goes. Thus far, it’s been just a really fun, nerdy bonding activity for us.
Again, this was definitely not the most convenient way to create and host a wedding website, but this was absolutely the only way for Daniel and I to go about creating and hosting ours. Not only did it allow for complete customization of the end product, but building our website from the ground up in our preferred programming language has already been the ultimate kick off to our engagement. We both love data and programming in R; why not incorporate that into our wedding? My favorite part of building our website this way is that it is just totally novel. Flexdashboards are typically purposed for displaying visuals for data, not as a media for wedding information, but this challenge was merely an exciting puzzle for two nerds to solve.
That’s all for now. Stay tuned for how-tos, details, tips, and inspiration for DIY wedding projects.